Abstract
We have fabricated and tested in long-term field operating conditions a wireless unit for outdoor air quality monitoring. The unit is equipped with two multiparametric sensors, one miniaturized thermo-hygrometer, front-end analogical and digital electronics, and an IEEE 802.15.4 based module for wireless data transmission. Micromachined platforms were functionalized with nanoporous metal-oxides to obtain multiparametric sensors, hosting gas-sensitive, anemometric and temperature transducers. Nanoporous metal-oxide layer was directly deposited on gas sensing regions of micromachined platform batches by hard-mask patterned supersonic cluster beam deposition. An outdoor, roadside experiment was arranged in downtown Milan (Italy), where one wireless sensing unit was continuously operated side by side with standard gas chromatographic instrumentation for air quality measurements. By means of a router PC, data from sensing unit and other instrumentation were collected, merged, and sent to a remote data storage server, through an UMTS device. The whole-system robustness as well as sensor dataset characteristics were continuously characterized over a run-time period of 18 months.
Highlights
Environmental sensing based on a network of small and inexpensive wireless sensors scattered over a very large area and able to detect tiny amounts of chemicals in air, water and soil has gained vast popularity among the scientific community and even in the popular press as a first line of defense to prevent terrorist attacks or environmental disasters [1]
Among various approaches in the use of advanced algorithms for data analysis taking into account history, we focused on Neural Networks (NN) [23]
Nanoporous layers have been integrated on micromachined platforms through supersonic cluster beam deposition
Summary
Environmental sensing based on a network of small and inexpensive wireless sensors (motes) scattered over a very large area and able to detect tiny amounts of chemicals in air, water and soil has gained vast popularity among the scientific community and even in the popular press as a first line of defense to prevent terrorist attacks or environmental disasters [1]. In pervasive sensing the information is extracted from the sensor network as a whole, in the form of a space distribution of a certain variable (temperature gradients, distribution of chemicals, wind velocity vector field, etc.) which can in principle be mapped and correlated with topological information such as for example, building distributions, the structure of main traffic-jammed roads, the presence of parks and rivers, industrial or dumping sites, etc This requires that each node of the sensing network be characterized by the coexistence on the same unit of sensing capabilities, dedicated electronics, power supply and a wireless communication system [3]. We will report on the fabrication of multiparametric sensors consisting in a micromachined platform, where the metal-oxide layer for gas sensing is produced by SCBD in form of a nanostructured film This platform is integrated with a miniaturized off-the-shelf thermo-hygrometer, proper front-end, pre-elaboration, as well as wireless communication electronics, in a wireless sensing unit. We will report on the setup and results after 18-months of running of the outdoor experiment involving a wireless sensing unit, side by side with standard instrumentation for air quality monitoring, whose aims were at first the testing of the overall robustness of the sensing unit, and secondarily the comparison between gas sensing signals, as generated in multiparametric sensors by complex chemical composition of unconditioned free air of downtown Milan, and data from standard instrumentation for air quality monitoring
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